Chanterelle mushrooms covering the floor of the woodland in, Athens, Georgia. This was two weeks ago when it was unseasonally cool and wet—how the weather has changed, crazy hot now!

Vegetable garden producing abundantly —needing plenty of water in this heat!

The English language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." George Orwell in Politics and the English Language

How a wild peanut strain help scientists develop a better variety, an awesome PlantBreeding story in ⁦The New York Times⁩! Congratulations ⁦David Bertioli⁩. Remove the paywall at archive.is/2025.07.24-142… nytimes.com/2025/07/24/din…

“Just as there is no use in medical study unless it leads to the health of the human body, so there is no use to a philosophical doctrine unless it leads to the virtue of the human soul.” “Musonius Rufus, Lectures 3-7”

"soul" in this context of classical thinking means "psyche", the inner self, especially the rational self

The Illusion of Explanatory Depth: We think we understand something until we’re asked to explain it. Often, we’re clueless. Breakdown, consequence, fix. 1/5

Ironically, excessive precaution causes harm. Excellent video with concrete examples!

Epictetus, writing 600 years after Socrates, echoes a timeless truth: any critique of reason must itself use reason, thus undermining its own case Steven Pinker makes the same case today. There is no rational escape from rationality.

“As far as the virtues of a man and a woman are concerned, it is entirely appropriate for both men and women to have the same upbringing and education. Just as no man would be properly educated without philosophy, so no woman would be either.” Musonius Rufus, lectures 4, ~70 AD

Daniel Kodsi's post highlights an uncomfortable truth for academics. Wherever academia is an echo chamber, the scholarly justification for tenure is undermined

Analysis of US college syllabi by the Open Syllabus project shows that bell hooks is assigned more than Aristotle, Judith Butler more than Plato, Edward Said more than than Kant, and Foucault more than everybody. (Thanks to Jon Shields for these comparisons.)

Feel-good claims around "regenerative" and "small family" farms crumble under expert analysis. Prof. Andrew McGuire calls it what it is—bullshit.

One of our top new peanut varieties from the Wild Peanut Lab — carrying nematode resistance from the wild species Arachis stenosperma — thriving in a field trial at Sanchez Farms, Florida, 90 days after planting. It’s also on trial at eight locations in Georgia!

Why has confidence in academia declined? I guess we'll never know... x.com/HSB_Lab/status…